Indische Mondsone unterwegs<br />
Chandrayaan-1, India's first mission to the Moon, was successfully launched on 22 October from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SHAR) in Sriharikota, India. The PSLV-C11 rocket, an upgraded version of the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, lifted off at 02:52 Central European Summer Time (CEST) and, about 20 minutes later, injected the spacecraft into a highly elongated orbit around Earth.

This marked the beginning of Chandrayaan-1's journey to the Moon, which will culminate with a major manoeuvre - the lunar orbit insertion - in about two weeks. Once the spacecraft is orbiting the Moon, further manoeuvres will progressively lower its altitude to the final 100 km-high circular orbit.Chandrayaan-1, ISRO's first mission beyond Earth orbit, marks the beginning of a new era of collaboration between ESA and India in space science. ESA is making the expertise gained thanks to its SMART-1 lunar mission (2003-2006) available for this collaboration. Apart from coordinating and supporting the provision of the three European instruments (C1XS, SIR-2 and SARA, versions of the first two of which flew on SMART-1), ESA assisted in areas such as flight dynamics and is supporting data archiving and processing. As a result of the collaboration, ESA and ISRO will share the data from their respective instruments.